


Howard Stark, Junior High Con Man

by resolute



Category: Agent Carter - Fandom, MCU, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Fanon, Gen, Headcanon, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 20:43:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3263744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resolute/pseuds/resolute
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After recent revelations in Agent Carter, Howard Stark's origin story needs revision. Here's my fanon origin of Howard Stark, based on Agent Carter. PLEASE BORROW, USE, AND MODIFY AT WILL. Go ye forth and spread the fanon. Credit or not, as your conscience dictates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Howard Stark, Junior High Con Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likeadeuce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/gifts).



Howard Stark was born to Hevitch and Tova Stakoviwcz. 

They were married in the old country, in Bavaria, but their families were not originally from that place. Stakoviwcz was a name with no home, not Bavaria, not Maldova, not Serbia. Perhaps it was best to leave the name behind.

Tova came over first. She had cousins here, cousins of cousins but that was enough. She came over and lived in a fifth floor walk-up with seven other girls. Tova worked second shift, and came home to sleep in the bed the other girls had vacated. She was a good girl.

Hevitch joined her in the summer, when New York was thick with disease. Hevitch and Tova moved to an efficiency behind Hevitch's uncle's boss's produce shop. The farmers woke the young couple before dawn all through that summer, but they did not mind. When Tova found she was pregnant, she stayed home and took in piecework. She sewed behind the counter all day. Maron, their landlord and the grocery's proprietor, found that Tova's presence increased his profits. He kept this knowledge to himself, but when it came time to raise the couple's rent he did not do so. A mitzvah.

Hevitch tried one thing and then another, and nothing seemed to work out right. It wasn't for lack of effort. It wasn't for lack of skill. It was because there was no lack of striving young men, dark and thin and sharp-eyed, all jostling for the same work. As summer wore into autumn, though, the cholera and yellow fever continued. The work was the same but the number of young men was fewer.

Hevitch delivered flowers for a greenhouse. The captains of industry, the barons and the lords of Fifth Avenue, they wanted flowers year-round. The greenhouses needed fast, careful men to run packages to pretty ladies in New York's bitter cold. The customers needed these men to be discrete. Hevitch did not tell even Tova who their patron was. But the money that came in after late, late nights was enough for Hevitch to buy his own barrow, purchase corner rights in the middle of Wall Street's busy throng, and buy cloth for the best new suit Tova could make.

Howard was born in the flat behind Maron's grocery. He was born in spring and new life was welcome. Maron's wife had died that winter, influenza. Hevitch had been sick for a short while, but now all were healthy. Howard learned to stand by pulling himself up on the produce bins.

The Starks moved to a coldwater flat closer to Wall Street, closer to Hevitch's corner. Howard learned to read and write, learned his figures and his Torah from his parents. He learned to knit and sew from Tova, but he also learned accounting, and profit margins, and production costs. From Hevitch Howard learned to judge customers, and he also learned to get up earlier than the next guy, to listen to his competition, to never leave a client unsatisfied. 

When Howard was six he went to public school and it was his turn to teach. His peers learned quickly to get in on the ground floor of a Stark operation, or be fleeced like a spring lamb.

At age twelve Howard left the public schools of New York. He got a job with his parents' old landlord, Maron. He clerked during the day, studied Torah at night, and was bar mitzva'd the week of his thirteenth birthday. Howard was a man now. He kept the grocer job and devoted his evening hours to Systems -- that's what everyone who lost money had, a System. Whether it was cards or horses, dogs or dice, all the losers had a System. Howard learned them all.

When he understood all the Systems, Howard sold them. He took the principles and wrote them up, made fancy flyers and pamphlets announcing a new, secret, system. He hired an older cousin to be the front man. They made hundreds of dollars before Tova found out. When Hevitch beat Howard, both of them crying, it wasn't for taking money from the stupid and optimistic. It was because the pamphlet was titled "Money-Making Secrets the Jews Don't Want YOU to Know!" 

No amount of Howard's protesting, that this was just to take money from bigots, helped. He told his mother that it was no harm to be cleverer than bad men, to take their stupidity and turn it against them. Tova hugged him close and wondered how she could convince her brilliant, charming, ambitious son that there was no profit to be had in toying with evil.


End file.
